1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to storage area network management, and more specifically, to storage area network management modeling simulation.
2. Background Art
Enterprise IT environment management is comprised of server, storage and network management. Storage resources management and Storage Area Network (SAN) management is the major part of any large-scale data centric enterprise. Basic structure of a SAN is represented in FIG. 1. FIG. 1 shows a storage area network (SAN) 100, a series of clients 102, and data storage 104. The clients, which may be, for example, personal computers or workstations, are connected to SAN 100 via a local area network 106; and SAN 100 is connected to a group of servers including file and print server 110, email server 112, and database server 114. FIG. 1 also shows a tape library 116 and management software 120 connected to the SAN 100.
Typically, SAN management software is comprised of basic components like discovery, control, monitoring, planning and reporting. Advanced analytics like predictive analysis, problem determination are built on top. Considering the heterogeneous and multi-vendor nature of the environment, performing the above tasks in a uniform fashion is a big challenge.
To address these challenges and bring in uniformity and interoperability, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) have come up with several standards like the Common Information Model (CIM), the Storage Management Interface-Standard (SMI-S) and the Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). Based on these standards, most of the SAN devices like Storage Subsystems, Tape Libraries and Fiber Channel Switches are shipped with a management module called Common Information Model (CIM) agent. For some devices, CIM agent is embedded in the device and for other devices, it is externally installed on a server. Popular systems management products like IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC), HP AppIQ, EMC Control Center exploit the above technologies to achieve their functionality. These tools also use SNMP and proprietary management methods in conjunction with CIM agent.
CIM agent is generally comprised of Common Information Model Object Manager (CIMOM) and a set of provider(s). CIMOM is the basic server infrastructure. Some popular open source CIMOMs are Pegasus, Sun WBEM and SNIA. Provider is the pluggable library that realizes the CIM profiles by serving the requested information out from the device.
Storage Management plays an important role in ensuring the service level agreements (availability, reliability, performance etc.) that are critical to the operation of resilient business IT infrastructure. Also, Storage Resource Management (SRM) is becoming the largest component in the overall cost of ownership of any large enterprise IT environment. Considering these functional requirements and business opportunities, several SRM suites have cropped up in the market place to provide uniform and interoperable management. But, development and test of these suites require access to huge set of heterogeneous multivendor Storage Area Network (SAN) devices like Fiber Channel Switches, Storage Subsystems, Tape Libraries, Servers etc. . . . It's almost impractical for a SRM Suite software manufacturer to own and manage these huge varieties of devices.
SRM vendors spend huge amount of money in setting up heterogeneous environment to develop and test their software or access geographically distributed heterogeneous environments over network. SNIA also hosts such a lab for interoperability and certification testing.
Administrators also do not have access to any standard primitives that can help them perform impact analysis before they deploy new hardware or perform certain configuration change operation on their SAN.